Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 70, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 March 1910 — APPENDICITIS AND COUT IN VOGUE 6000 YEARS AGO. [ARTICLE]

APPENDICITIS AND COUT IN VOGUE 6000 YEARS AGO.

If the world was created 6,000 years ago and the story of the expulsion from Eden is not a myth, confirmatory evidence of that fact will be found by old-line Bible people in some of the things recently unearthed in Nubia. From very recent research it has been established that disease entered the world in the form of gout and tuberculosis not less than 6,000 years ago—either entered it at that time or had been there for an indeterminable time previously. Nearly sixty centuries have rolled away since the Nubians lived in the Valley of the Nile and were victims of the intestinal concretions which seem to be the cause of appendicitis. Fortunately for archaeological science, the diggers took with them an anatomist or two, who knew a thing or so about their business, and turned over to their inspection the bodies that were unearthed from this ancient civilization which has been lying buried under the wash and sands of 4. he Nile from a time which merges into.the vanishing point of history, in these excavations were found evidences of a civilization from a date preceding the earliest known dynasties of Egyptian kings down to the Byzantine age. These people seem to have lived undisturbed in the possession of their fertile fields and their well-built towns, probably under the protection of the kings of Egypt. In fact, a careful examination of their heads and faces showed that they were in reality Egyptians themselves. They did not belong to the aristocracy, but were rather the humble tillers of the soil—the farmers of that prehistoric time. They had a knowledge of copper, but they had not yet progressed sufficiently far in the metallic arts—in the period previous to say 1800 B. C.—to use that metal for instruments. The only utility they could fiqd for copper was its use as ornaments for the person. For this purpose it was manufactured and sold

extensively. For tools the Nubians of that date used stone, and very good and sharp-cutting tools they made of it, too. Flint lance-heads and flint knives were found m abundance, but no trace of a copper tool was in evidence for some centuries. The next period ranges from 2800 B. C. to 1800 B. C., during which copper was discovered to be highly useful as a cutting metal and was manufactured accordingly. s This was also the period of greatest change in the bodily characters of these people. The anatomists who made the examinations declared that a new type of man had been imported among the people of the lower Nile and had mixed his blood with that of the people he found there before him. The secret of the perfect preservation of bodies for sixty centuries lies in the fact that the people, probably not able to afford the methods of embalming that were practiced by t;he “swell” Egyptians, just took their dead and thoroughly salted the bodies. One disease which seemed to have been prevalent to an extraordinary degree was rheumatic gout. Thousands of these people had suffered from gout and from rheumatism. Graves were found containing fifteen or twenty bodies, all members of the same family, and several generations of the same family. The anatomists were thereby enabled to trace peculiar anatomical resemblances from father to son, as well as evidences of transmitted disease.

That this marvelous method of preserving the dead is not practicable generally to day is due to the fact that one of the essentials of the success of the method is the peculiarly dry atmosphere of Egypt and the unlimited quantities of perfectly dry sand in which to bury the bodies after they have been treated with the salt or the solution of salt which the ancient Nubians used.